Best FOSS alternative for skype?

[Tim]

On Wed, 2011-05-11 at 10:27 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
> And thanks to NAT-hatred in the standards process, most of those
> require finagling firewall forwarding fritters..er... rules

Well, to be fair, *NAT* is an obstacle, in the real meaning of the word.
It does make it difficult to do anything that must accept an incoming
connection.  The only real way to get around that is for your client to
make use of a server, so that means true peer-to-peer is out of the
question, some external (or on the border) management is required.  NAT,
*itself*, is the major problem.

And on the other hand, various protocols do require far too many ports,
and sometimes unplannable port numbers, open in various directions.  So,
never mind NAT, they're a networking nightmare in themselves.  Making
your webserver accessible, for instance, is rather easy; you just open
port 80.  If other clients would stop being NAT *stupid*, and be more
simple in design, this would be less of an issue.  We're stuck with NAT,
for the long term, so clients and protocols would be better designed not
to be so damn over-complicated.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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